EVERY STEP I TAKE

EVERY STEP I TAKE

Every step I take either a crossroads, an impasse,

or a dubious suspension bridge that looks like

the work of spiders swaying over an abyss.

Eerie thresholds that don’t scare me the way they used to.

I take them now as if I were dancing

with clear-sighted surrealistic suicidal abandon

and what used to threaten me so deeply

I laugh at now as if it were just another buffoon

that overdid it, and turned its legend into a farce.

The furies that swarmed me once for things

I couldn’t even imagine doing at my most bitter

have mythically dwindled into black flies of the mind.

Now I smile at them like a miniature Pearl Harbour

dive-bombing a rotten piece of fruit. Malignant pests.

Even in my homelessness, kamikaze pilots

drunk on sake, bad house guests binging

on a divine wind that sweeps them all away

from the brittle sky above the windowsill

that fakes them all out eventually, though it’s sadder

on the other side, to witness the death of birds.

Once you accept you’re going to lose everything

you’re inestimably freer to spit in the eye

of your tormentor, and in that moment of enlightenment

the power and superstition of a madman in the joint

that could scare even Joe Frazier like Muhammad Ali

losing it at a weigh-in, overcomes you as if

your death were already behind you, inconceivably achieved.

You learn to stay ahead of the past, like a star,

shining down on the future history of who you are

even when you’re convinced you’re not anything

whether you win or lose and everything you do

is a risk you must take to keep on deepening your solitude

without shaming the eagles by living like a maggot

who sees a rainbow in a drug-induced mirage

and dreams it’s turning into a butterfly

with the dead-eyed instincts of a bird of prey.

Compassion isn’t the mirage a white flag you hang

like a bed sheet outside the window

to surrender your ego like a weapon.

Like a flower, it’s a sign of resistance that begins

deep underground in the blood roots

of a cult of rain and light that death cannot suppress.

It’s a compact with pain that enlightens the way of the other

by taking the egg-laying turtle of the world off the road

or using your own backbone to splint the broken rafter

of a house of life that could not stand without you,

one light enjoined to another like honey in the heart of a beehive

buzzing with stars. Not an alchemical crack house

freebasing its own mythic inflation like a dealer

tripping out on his product in a riot of vacillating ideals

that wobble like uninhabited planets losing their spin.

Compassion is a warrior. Not a martyr of circumstance.

Or the short straw of the last chance to be someone

on your deathbed like a sword between you and what you loved

as you lay side by side together and dreamed

your courage away by hesitating in the moment.

Sometimes mystic disobedience is a greater sign of love

than all the echoes and shades of our oaths and vows are.

Compassion’s a candle with the heart of a dragon

and it roars into the silence of its imperious empathy

like a black czar at the wedding of the waterlilies,

raising them up like paupers and constellations

or the crystal palace of the Celts wheeling in Corona Borealis

like a Sufi dancing with the dust and the wind at a crossroads

to celebrate his own annihilation in the rapture of his wisdom

to leave every room in his heart open to everyone else

as one of the fundamental conditions of intelligent space.

Not to fit the uniqueness of the human face to a life mask

compounded of enculturated delusions of its just proportions,

but to see in every one of its tears, a locket with the moon inside,

like a ripening lyric to the beauty of longing fulfilled,

a windfall shaken down in a sudden squall of stars

that fall to earth like the seeds of urgent cherry blossoms

to make way for the vital fruits of their unspoken exile.

PATRICK WHITE